I never encountered an actual application written in Ruby
And I've never seen an actual application written in Perl or Python. By "actual application" I mean something that a non-programmer end user would download for a specific task not related to the maintenance of the computer.
It's always crashed with quicktime before. So I'm trying it again. Nope, still crashes... [MPlayer interrupted by signal 11 in module: init_audio_codec]
Okay, great. I can open any Powerpoint doc in OpenOffice. But, nearly everything comes up as a 'flattened' slide, with the internal text/boxes/images wholly unmodifiable.
I don't have a problem with PowerPoint docs in OpenOffice at all! It just works. I use the corporate PowerPoint templates all the time. I edit other people's docs all the time. It just works.
I'd love to see out of the box, GUI-based remote client administration for desktop linux...
Perhaps you're problem was with Mandrake, and not Linux itself? After five years of using Linux and BSD systems as my primary OS, I've found that the most aggravating ones were those geared towards the desktop.
Speaking of installation problems, at work we have a bunch of Solaris boxes, and of course the obligatory Window units. Guess which one is easier for a trained sysadmin to install?
Solaris. Use Jumpstart, a master disk image for those times when the harddrive fails, and keep the home directories non-local, and you're set.
Windows and Linux both use the same roads. It's called the TCP/IP network. The automobile may have put the buggy whip manufacturers out of business, but it did nothing but help the road builders and maintainers.
The title of this Slashdot article is "The Failures of Desktop Linux". Yet this is NOT a failure of desktop Linux, but rather a problem "interacting with the corporate Windows network".
Big difference!
I'm not using Linux in a corporate environment, but I am using FreeBSD, which has exactly the same "desktop" software. It interacts with the mandated corporate Windows network just fine. There are some problems, but nothing that couldn't be easily fixed on the IT side of things.
For example, I can't use Outlook Calendar, and sometimes I need to schedule meetings. I can't use Korganizer or Ximian Connector, because they require the Outlook servers to turn on WebDAV. But all it would take for it to work would be for IT to click one single checkbox in the server configuration screen. This is by far the biggest pain I have, but it's one trivially solved if IT wanted it solved.
There is some minor problems with MSWord documents, particularly those with tables and form elements. But in the two years I've used FreeBSD at work, I've never had to boot into Windows to open a Word document. In fact, the ONLY time I boot into Windows is to run Outlook Calendar, and play Quicktime LOTR trailers...
If there are problems interacting with the corporate Windows environment, then blame the environment, and not Linux, BSD, Apple, or anyone else. Saying Linux is a failure on the desktop because it isn't a Microsoft product is like saying the Dodge Neon is a failure as an automobile because it doesn't use Ford Taurus parts.
It's important to remember that Linux got a huge boost in popularity when BSD was being sued by USL. It was the wrong lawsuit at the wrong time.
As a FreeBSD user, I'm still ambivalent in the attitude towards BSD gaining popularity via the SCO FUD campaign. One part of me thinks it's great, but another part is embarrassed to be profiting at a friend's expense. It's not "fair" that people will be choosing BSD based on the childish rantings of Daryl McBride. But neither is it "fair" that people choose Linux just because the media tells everyone that Linux == Open Source.
Actually, that's a damn good idea. I would have my apps put their.rc's there, except that I would be the only one doing so.
But the raisins aren't hysterical. The reason is that it is up the individual application, and not the OS, to decide where the user configuration files go. It's nothing a distro can mandate.
The LSB simply makes official the extensions and common way of doing things that has grown up in the years since POSIX stopped evolving.
Except that many of these extensions and ways of doing things are only common on Linux systems. A program that adheres to POSIX isn't guaranteed portable to Linux, and a LSB compliant program isn't guaranteed to be portable to Solaris, BSD, AIX, HPUX, etc.
Never used Psi, but my own program, QBrew, looks like a genuine native Windows program. Wait, it is! It just uses Qt instead of MFC or.NET. It certainly looks a lot more "native" than Visual Studio.NET.
I did change the icons, so they're not standard. I used it, but dammit they were ugly! But the controls are indistinguishable from Windows controls.
You're wrong, the Boost signal library is superior to Qt's solution.
One thing I always check for when someone says they have a better solution, is how they handle "dangling callbacks." Boost doesn't. If you have a signal connected to a slot, and the object the slot is in gets destroyed, and then you emit the signal, WHAMMO!
I wrote a template-based signal/slot mechanism once, and taking care of dangling callbacks wasn't that terribly difficult. But the last time I used Boost.Signals, about six months ago, it didn't handle it. This is Not Good(tm).
Also last time I used Boost.Signals, it was a major pain in the butt trying to connect a signal to a member function slot. If you can't do that, then what's the point? Hopefully they've addressed that issue by now.
For example, slots connected to a signal in Qt cannot return a value to the signal emitter, whereas Boost.Signals allows this.
It's a signal, not a connection. If you want a return value, then you're using the wrong paradigm. This does not To quote from the Qt docs: "It does not know or care whether anything is receiving the signals it emits. This is true information encapsulation, and ensures that the object can be used as a software component."
Re:Splash Screen
on
QT 3.2 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I guess implementing a --no-splash is probably not in the.plan for some future
Well, it's also goes against the Way of Doing Things. Standard Qt command line options should not modify the behavior of the software. So the command line options you see are stuff like fonts, colormaps and the like. You don't see stuff like "--cancel-button-left" because that's not Qt's job, it's the developer's.
KDE is another story, because part of the purpose of KDE is to provide a unifrom look and feel for the desktop. I can easily imagine a KSplash class that checks for a --no-splash option.
Try actually using both. Qt signal/slots are much more flexible than Boost.Signals. But beyond that, I did a test once (for a class) where I used Qt signal/slots versus Boost.Signals for the exact same test application. The Qt version was 17k statically linked. The Boost version was 60k statically linked. In addition, the syntax was significantly gnarlier with Boost than with Qt.
How greedy is it to sit and contemplate whether you are going to have steak or lobster tonite, or whether your kids are going to a private boarding school in connecticut or massachusetts...
You're talking about the upper 1% of the populace, but you want to take out your anger on the upper 50% instead. I am considered to be rich but my choices for a meal tonight consist of spaghetti versus hamburgers.
I'm doing much better than I was though. For a few years the choice was mac-n-cheese versus mac-n-cheese. I was just as miserable as you. I hated everyone who made more many than me. Then I visited Tijuana. My life has never been the same since. You on your $7000 income ARE the filthy rich compared to a family living in a cardboard box on the edge of a dump in Tijuana. Your envy is so firmly fixed upon anyone richer than you that you are ignorant of those with poverty magnitudes greater than yours.
Fuck you if you're rich and don't want to pay taxes.
Fuck you if you're poor and don't want to give a third your income to the truly destitute. $2100 goes a heck of a long way in the dumps of Tijuana. But you don't help them because you're too busy saying "fuck you" to the rich to bother.
I am not a liberal, but there are many liberals I truly admire. I truly admire Jimmy Carter. Jimmy does not go around saying "fuck you". Instead he builds houses for those who can't afford to. Maybe you can't afford to build a house for someone else, but dammit you can still afford to join Housing for Humanity and pound in a few nails on the weekend! Or are you simply too busy saying "fuck you" to bother?
It is about redistribution of wealth, which is a good thing.
Voluntary redistribution of wealth is a good thing. Involuntary redistribution of wealth via government coercion and threat of imprisonment or death if you refuse is a bad thing.
When wealthy people amass a fortune and do not have anything to do with it, it's called hoarding (see also "middle ages"). It stagnates the economy and stalls progress.
Too true. Which is why there's this thing called "banking". You get to pretend that you're hoarding your wealth, when in fact it's being used to help poor people purchase their first home, poor people to start up a small shop, and poor people to provide an education for their children. The days of hoarding wealth are long in the past (see also "middle ages"). The rich may be leaving it to their kids instead of to the poor, but it most certainly is not being hidden under the mattress.
My annual income is $7,000.
Whining isn't going to get you a bigger income. My grandfather came to the US with only a suitcase. He spent his life driving a truck. But he managed to buy himself a house and send my father to college. The richest person in my home town started out making burritos in his garage. Now he owns the largest frozen burrito company in the world. But he never went to school, wasn't white, and his parent's didn't even speak English. One of my mom's high school friends grew up picking cotton. He put himself through college. While teaching school he took night classes for years until he finally got a PhD, and finally earned some real money. After retirement he spent a while in Brazil helping the poor by setting up a school.
The point is, you can do it, but you have to do it yourself. The govenment isn't going to help you, because all they want is your vote. You don't have to have rich parents. You don't have to be a white male. You don't even have to be educated. But you do have to work hard, get to know a lot of people, and make the best of the limited opportunities that come your way.
But he doesn't go on to explain WHY this is significant. Is it because the author is surprised that a conservative can have an intelligent thought?
The general belief in the Free Software and Open Source movements (his target audience) is that conservatives are the problem. When there was a story here about Steve Forbes coming out against strong copyright, Slashdot readers were aghast. When Phyllis Schlafly come out against the same thing, Slashdot readers were befuddled.
Copyright is an invention of government. The stronger the copyright the bigger the government. To wield copyright as a legal cudgel to get your way is to wield government power. Since classic conservatism (not necessarily modern conservatism) is for smaller government, it shouldn't surprise anyone that classic conservatives like Forbes, Schlafly and Bloom should be against copyright.
People in this movement really do believe that D-for-Disney Hollings is on their side. They really do believe that Label-the-CDs Lieberman is on their side. They're so ecstatic about Dean knowing how to create a webpage that they're falling all over themselves trying to be the first to worship him. Big government is the antithesis of freedom and openness. It's a shame that Republican party has lost its conservative center, but that's another topic...
What happened to conservatism?
on
Saving the Net
·
· Score: 1
What happened to conservatism. Doc has a quote that I think holds the answer:
"Combine the two, and you get conservatives eagerly rewarding companies whose primary achievements consist of successful long-term adaptation to highly regulated environments."
In the past conservatives were for the free market. They were for individual initiative. They were for rewarding hard work. Many conservatives of the past would be right at home in the libertarian movement today. That was the conservatism of the forties and fifties. Then it changed ever so slightly. The new emphasis was on business. To be a conservative was to be pro-business. This wasn't a great change, since to be pro-business in the sixties and seventies was to be in favor of free markets and individual initiative and hard work.
The problem is that businesses changed but the conservative mantra did not. The family farm gave way to big agribusiness. Getting a loan from the local bank to start a shop disappeared in favor of wooing venture capital. Private business was all but replaced by public corporations. This happened during the eighties and nineties.
Now it is the aptly named naughts, and the world has been turned upside down. When Dean looks like a conservative, there is something terribly wrong with modern conservatism. It's time to slap these people upside the head and say that Sleepycat Software is every bit as worthy as Oracle, that your local ISP is every bit as worthy as SBC. It's time to take conservatism back to its roots, and make it favor free markets and enterprises once more, instead of this pandering to corporations.
p.s. I'll leave my rant against the modern liberal, and their preference of unions instead of workers, for another time...
Re:Splash Screen
on
QT 3.2 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The QSplash class is trivial. So trivial I wrote my own in an hour that turned out to 95% identical to Qt's before I knew that they were going to have one. It simply puts a pixmap widget on the screen, starts a timer, and waits for either a timeout or a mouseclick.
QSplash is not going to check the command line arguments. This is an instance where it is the programmer's job to determine if the user wants a splash screen or not. But don't worry too much, every instance of a splash screen in a Qt application I have ever seen (Kdevelop, Quanta, etc) allows you to turn it off. Using QSplash instead of a homegrown splash isn't going to change this.
That's what I thought it meant. So explain to me again why C/C++, Ruby, Java, etc, are not considered "app-dev" languages?
Give me that on Linux and I'll migrate over to it ever quicker!
What the heck are you waiting for! I'm not a Java developer, but everything you want is already available. I'm a C++ person, so I prefer KDevelop, Qt and Designer, which gives me what you say you want. C++ may not have garbage collection, but it does have memory management, made even easier with Boost. Or what about Kylix? Black Adder? (RAD with Ruby, awesome!) Anjuta? Eclipse?
I don't use Linux, I use FreeBSD, but the development platforms for them are identical. If I can do it on FreeBSD, you can do it on Linux.
Traditionally, it has been the unskilled or semiskilled labor which has been moved overseas. We outsourced people who pushed buttons, soldered on capacitors, and tightened lug nuts (no offense to those of you who do that for a living). This New Economy is different. They're outsourcing EVERYTHING that isn't directly related to pampering the executive management.
The automotive industry outsources its assembly, but it does not outsource its research and design. That work is still being done in domestically. But not in the tech industry! My company is outsourcing (their official term is "offshoring") core engineering positions. Maybe I'm just an old fart or something, but you simply do not outsource your future. IBM seems to be only offshoring "service" positions. I'm assuming that is semi-skilled tech support. But if they were my company, they would be moving the entire Almaden facility overseas. If Sun was my company they would be moving all Java development overseas.
Programming should not be a commodity any more than dentistry, architecture or civil engineering should be a commodity. That programming is being seen as a commodity is a sad reflection of the state of our profession. We have only ourselves to blame if we are not seen as useful producers of revenue.
What exactly is an "app-dev language"? Isn't "app-dev" merely a cheesy abbreviation for "application development"? Why do people assume that you need a RAD tool for application development? Delphi is cool (any OO Pascal has to be cool), but what about C/C++, Ruby, Java, etc?
Slashdot Mirror
I never encountered an actual application written in Ruby
And I've never seen an actual application written in Perl or Python. By "actual application" I mean something that a non-programmer end user would download for a specific task not related to the maintenance of the computer.
If you consider that the self is property, then all of the above are really property rights.
It's always crashed with quicktime before. So I'm trying it again. Nope, still crashes... [MPlayer interrupted by signal 11 in module: init_audio_codec]
Okay, great. I can open any Powerpoint doc in OpenOffice. But, nearly everything comes up as a 'flattened' slide, with the internal text/boxes/images wholly unmodifiable.
I don't have a problem with PowerPoint docs in OpenOffice at all! It just works. I use the corporate PowerPoint templates all the time. I edit other people's docs all the time. It just works.
I'd love to see out of the box, GUI-based remote client administration for desktop linux...
Does WebMin count?
Perhaps you're problem was with Mandrake, and not Linux itself? After five years of using Linux and BSD systems as my primary OS, I've found that the most aggravating ones were those geared towards the desktop.
Speaking of installation problems, at work we have a bunch of Solaris boxes, and of course the obligatory Window units. Guess which one is easier for a trained sysadmin to install?
Solaris. Use Jumpstart, a master disk image for those times when the harddrive fails, and keep the home directories non-local, and you're set.
Windows and Linux both use the same roads. It's called the TCP/IP network. The automobile may have put the buggy whip manufacturers out of business, but it did nothing but help the road builders and maintainers.
The title of this Slashdot article is "The Failures of Desktop Linux". Yet this is NOT a failure of desktop Linux, but rather a problem "interacting with the corporate Windows network".
Big difference!
I'm not using Linux in a corporate environment, but I am using FreeBSD, which has exactly the same "desktop" software. It interacts with the mandated corporate Windows network just fine. There are some problems, but nothing that couldn't be easily fixed on the IT side of things.
For example, I can't use Outlook Calendar, and sometimes I need to schedule meetings. I can't use Korganizer or Ximian Connector, because they require the Outlook servers to turn on WebDAV. But all it would take for it to work would be for IT to click one single checkbox in the server configuration screen. This is by far the biggest pain I have, but it's one trivially solved if IT wanted it solved.
There is some minor problems with MSWord documents, particularly those with tables and form elements. But in the two years I've used FreeBSD at work, I've never had to boot into Windows to open a Word document. In fact, the ONLY time I boot into Windows is to run Outlook Calendar, and play Quicktime LOTR trailers...
If there are problems interacting with the corporate Windows environment, then blame the environment, and not Linux, BSD, Apple, or anyone else. Saying Linux is a failure on the desktop because it isn't a Microsoft product is like saying the Dodge Neon is a failure as an automobile because it doesn't use Ford Taurus parts.
It's important to remember that Linux got a huge boost in popularity when BSD was being sued by USL. It was the wrong lawsuit at the wrong time.
As a FreeBSD user, I'm still ambivalent in the attitude towards BSD gaining popularity via the SCO FUD campaign. One part of me thinks it's great, but another part is embarrassed to be profiting at a friend's expense. It's not "fair" that people will be choosing BSD based on the childish rantings of Daryl McBride. But neither is it "fair" that people choose Linux just because the media tells everyone that Linux == Open Source.
You might want to try constructing a FreeBSD cluster of commodity pizza boxes instead...
Why isn't this in ~/etc/?
.rc's there, except that I would be the only one doing so.
Actually, that's a damn good idea. I would have my apps put their
But the raisins aren't hysterical. The reason is that it is up the individual application, and not the OS, to decide where the user configuration files go. It's nothing a distro can mandate.
The LSB simply makes official the extensions and common way of doing things that has grown up in the years since POSIX stopped evolving.
Except that many of these extensions and ways of doing things are only common on Linux systems. A program that adheres to POSIX isn't guaranteed portable to Linux, and a LSB compliant program isn't guaranteed to be portable to Solaris, BSD, AIX, HPUX, etc.
Never used Psi, but my own program, QBrew, looks like a genuine native Windows program. Wait, it is! It just uses Qt instead of MFC or .NET. It certainly looks a lot more "native" than Visual Studio .NET.
I did change the icons, so they're not standard. I used it, but dammit they were ugly! But the controls are indistinguishable from Windows controls.
Have you ever seen a native Qt program under Windows? I can't tell the difference.
Ummm, this article is about embedding Mozilla in a Cocoa application. So you need an entry-level Mac to begin with in order to use it.
You're wrong, the Boost signal library is superior to Qt's solution.
One thing I always check for when someone says they have a better solution, is how they handle "dangling callbacks." Boost doesn't. If you have a signal connected to a slot, and the object the slot is in gets destroyed, and then you emit the signal, WHAMMO!
I wrote a template-based signal/slot mechanism once, and taking care of dangling callbacks wasn't that terribly difficult. But the last time I used Boost.Signals, about six months ago, it didn't handle it. This is Not Good(tm).
Also last time I used Boost.Signals, it was a major pain in the butt trying to connect a signal to a member function slot. If you can't do that, then what's the point? Hopefully they've addressed that issue by now.
For example, slots connected to a signal in Qt cannot return a value to the signal emitter, whereas Boost.Signals allows this.
It's a signal, not a connection. If you want a return value, then you're using the wrong paradigm. This does not To quote from the Qt docs: "It does not know or care whether anything is receiving the signals it emits. This is true information encapsulation, and ensures that the object can be used as a software component."
I guess implementing a --no-splash is probably not in the .plan for some future
Well, it's also goes against the Way of Doing Things. Standard Qt command line options should not modify the behavior of the software. So the command line options you see are stuff like fonts, colormaps and the like. You don't see stuff like "--cancel-button-left" because that's not Qt's job, it's the developer's.
KDE is another story, because part of the purpose of KDE is to provide a unifrom look and feel for the desktop. I can easily imagine a KSplash class that checks for a --no-splash option.
Try actually using both. Qt signal/slots are much more flexible than Boost.Signals. But beyond that, I did a test once (for a class) where I used Qt signal/slots versus Boost.Signals for the exact same test application. The Qt version was 17k statically linked. The Boost version was 60k statically linked. In addition, the syntax was significantly gnarlier with Boost than with Qt.
How greedy is it to sit and contemplate whether you are going to have steak or lobster tonite, or whether your kids are going to a private boarding school in connecticut or massachusetts...
You're talking about the upper 1% of the populace, but you want to take out your anger on the upper 50% instead. I am considered to be rich but my choices for a meal tonight consist of spaghetti versus hamburgers.
I'm doing much better than I was though. For a few years the choice was mac-n-cheese versus mac-n-cheese. I was just as miserable as you. I hated everyone who made more many than me. Then I visited Tijuana. My life has never been the same since. You on your $7000 income ARE the filthy rich compared to a family living in a cardboard box on the edge of a dump in Tijuana. Your envy is so firmly fixed upon anyone richer than you that you are ignorant of those with poverty magnitudes greater than yours.
Fuck you if you're rich and don't want to pay taxes.
Fuck you if you're poor and don't want to give a third your income to the truly destitute. $2100 goes a heck of a long way in the dumps of Tijuana. But you don't help them because you're too busy saying "fuck you" to the rich to bother.
I am not a liberal, but there are many liberals I truly admire. I truly admire Jimmy Carter. Jimmy does not go around saying "fuck you". Instead he builds houses for those who can't afford to. Maybe you can't afford to build a house for someone else, but dammit you can still afford to join Housing for Humanity and pound in a few nails on the weekend! Or are you simply too busy saying "fuck you" to bother?
It is about redistribution of wealth, which is a good thing.
Voluntary redistribution of wealth is a good thing. Involuntary redistribution of wealth via government coercion and threat of imprisonment or death if you refuse is a bad thing.
When wealthy people amass a fortune and do not have anything to do with it, it's called hoarding (see also "middle ages"). It stagnates the economy and stalls progress.
Too true. Which is why there's this thing called "banking". You get to pretend that you're hoarding your wealth, when in fact it's being used to help poor people purchase their first home, poor people to start up a small shop, and poor people to provide an education for their children. The days of hoarding wealth are long in the past (see also "middle ages"). The rich may be leaving it to their kids instead of to the poor, but it most certainly is not being hidden under the mattress.
My annual income is $7,000.
Whining isn't going to get you a bigger income. My grandfather came to the US with only a suitcase. He spent his life driving a truck. But he managed to buy himself a house and send my father to college. The richest person in my home town started out making burritos in his garage. Now he owns the largest frozen burrito company in the world. But he never went to school, wasn't white, and his parent's didn't even speak English. One of my mom's high school friends grew up picking cotton. He put himself through college. While teaching school he took night classes for years until he finally got a PhD, and finally earned some real money. After retirement he spent a while in Brazil helping the poor by setting up a school.
The point is, you can do it, but you have to do it yourself. The govenment isn't going to help you, because all they want is your vote. You don't have to have rich parents. You don't have to be a white male. You don't even have to be educated. But you do have to work hard, get to know a lot of people, and make the best of the limited opportunities that come your way.
But he doesn't go on to explain WHY this is significant. Is it because the author is surprised that a conservative can have an intelligent thought?
The general belief in the Free Software and Open Source movements (his target audience) is that conservatives are the problem. When there was a story here about Steve Forbes coming out against strong copyright, Slashdot readers were aghast. When Phyllis Schlafly come out against the same thing, Slashdot readers were befuddled.
Copyright is an invention of government. The stronger the copyright the bigger the government. To wield copyright as a legal cudgel to get your way is to wield government power. Since classic conservatism (not necessarily modern conservatism) is for smaller government, it shouldn't surprise anyone that classic conservatives like Forbes, Schlafly and Bloom should be against copyright.
People in this movement really do believe that D-for-Disney Hollings is on their side. They really do believe that Label-the-CDs Lieberman is on their side. They're so ecstatic about Dean knowing how to create a webpage that they're falling all over themselves trying to be the first to worship him. Big government is the antithesis of freedom and openness. It's a shame that Republican party has lost its conservative center, but that's another topic...
What happened to conservatism. Doc has a quote that I think holds the answer:
"Combine the two, and you get conservatives eagerly rewarding companies whose primary achievements consist of successful long-term adaptation to highly regulated environments."
In the past conservatives were for the free market. They were for individual initiative. They were for rewarding hard work. Many conservatives of the past would be right at home in the libertarian movement today. That was the conservatism of the forties and fifties. Then it changed ever so slightly. The new emphasis was on business. To be a conservative was to be pro-business. This wasn't a great change, since to be pro-business in the sixties and seventies was to be in favor of free markets and individual initiative and hard work.
The problem is that businesses changed but the conservative mantra did not. The family farm gave way to big agribusiness. Getting a loan from the local bank to start a shop disappeared in favor of wooing venture capital. Private business was all but replaced by public corporations. This happened during the eighties and nineties.
Now it is the aptly named naughts, and the world has been turned upside down. When Dean looks like a conservative, there is something terribly wrong with modern conservatism. It's time to slap these people upside the head and say that Sleepycat Software is every bit as worthy as Oracle, that your local ISP is every bit as worthy as SBC. It's time to take conservatism back to its roots, and make it favor free markets and enterprises once more, instead of this pandering to corporations.
p.s. I'll leave my rant against the modern liberal, and their preference of unions instead of workers, for another time...
The QSplash class is trivial. So trivial I wrote my own in an hour that turned out to 95% identical to Qt's before I knew that they were going to have one. It simply puts a pixmap widget on the screen, starts a timer, and waits for either a timeout or a mouseclick.
QSplash is not going to check the command line arguments. This is an instance where it is the programmer's job to determine if the user wants a splash screen or not. But don't worry too much, every instance of a splash screen in a Qt application I have ever seen (Kdevelop, Quanta, etc) allows you to turn it off. Using QSplash instead of a homegrown splash isn't going to change this.
That's what I thought it meant. So explain to me again why C/C++, Ruby, Java, etc, are not considered "app-dev" languages?
Give me that on Linux and I'll migrate over to it ever quicker!
What the heck are you waiting for! I'm not a Java developer, but everything you want is already available. I'm a C++ person, so I prefer KDevelop, Qt and Designer, which gives me what you say you want. C++ may not have garbage collection, but it does have memory management, made even easier with Boost. Or what about Kylix? Black Adder? (RAD with Ruby, awesome!) Anjuta? Eclipse?
I don't use Linux, I use FreeBSD, but the development platforms for them are identical. If I can do it on FreeBSD, you can do it on Linux.
Traditionally, it has been the unskilled or semiskilled labor which has been moved overseas. We outsourced people who pushed buttons, soldered on capacitors, and tightened lug nuts (no offense to those of you who do that for a living). This New Economy is different. They're outsourcing EVERYTHING that isn't directly related to pampering the executive management.
The automotive industry outsources its assembly, but it does not outsource its research and design. That work is still being done in domestically. But not in the tech industry! My company is outsourcing (their official term is "offshoring") core engineering positions. Maybe I'm just an old fart or something, but you simply do not outsource your future. IBM seems to be only offshoring "service" positions. I'm assuming that is semi-skilled tech support. But if they were my company, they would be moving the entire Almaden facility overseas. If Sun was my company they would be moving all Java development overseas.
Programming should not be a commodity any more than dentistry, architecture or civil engineering should be a commodity. That programming is being seen as a commodity is a sad reflection of the state of our profession. We have only ourselves to blame if we are not seen as useful producers of revenue.
What exactly is an "app-dev language"? Isn't "app-dev" merely a cheesy abbreviation for "application development"? Why do people assume that you need a RAD tool for application development? Delphi is cool (any OO Pascal has to be cool), but what about C/C++, Ruby, Java, etc?